Re: Symlinks being destroyed on boot in /dev

["Kevin P. Fleming" <kpfleming@xxxxxxx>]

Robert wrote:

> Hello,
>    I'm reposting this problem, as another maillist person (Russell Coker) made
> a valiant effort to solve this problem for me, but this has him stumped as
> well.
>    Well, this all started when I installed the Linux Mandrake 8.2 Upgrade
> CDROM a month ago.   I found out quickly that I could not access my internal
> IDE 256Mb Zip drive.   So I started to read as much as I could find about

Stop! You've gone way, way beyond what was necessary here!

The root of your problem is that in current 2.4.x kernels, if you don't have a 
piece of media in your removable media ATAPI drive (your ZIP drive) when you 
boot the kernel, and you are using devfs, the drive will not show up in 
/dev/discs. Also, if you are using devfsd, no compatibility symlinks will be 
created, since the main entry was not created. Even if you do have media in the 
drive when you boot the kernel, if you later change media the kernel will not do 
a very good job of updating the /dev entries to match the new media.

This has been discussed before on this list, I'm surprised you didn't find it 
when you checked the list archives <G>. The simple solution is to wait for the 
2.4.20 kernel to be released, it should have a patch to make the drive appear 
even without media in it at boot time.

There are also patches on my web site (URL below) for making the media change 
handling better; they have been sent to the 2.4 kernel maintainer, but I don't 
know when they'll get incorporated into the mainline kernel. In the interim, you 
can apply them yourself and get these problems pretty well solved.

If you're not up to compiling and installing your own kernel, then you're going 
to have a problem. devfs and ZIP drives don't get along well without the patches 
(which is not devfs' fault, by the way).

http://members.cox.net/kpfleming/ide-floppy has the patches mentioned above.